David Busch's Nikon D300 Guide to Digital SLR Photography [Paperback]

David D. Busch (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1598635344 | ISBN-13: 978-1598635348 | Publication Date: April 15, 2008 | Edition: 1

Have you unpacked your new Nikon D300 digital SLR camera and want to get started right away taking professional quality pictures? David Busch's Nikon D300 Guide to Digital SLR Photography will show you how, when, and why to use all the cool features, controls, and functions of your camera to take great photographs of anything. After a brief introduction to the camera to help you get your bearings, you'll dive right into all the exciting, innovative capabilities of the D300 including the focus controls, flash synchronization options, how to choose lenses, and which exposure modes are best. Beautiful, full-color images illustrate where the essential buttons and dials are, and you'll find tips and techniques that can be applied to any type of photography to help you take better pictures with your new digital SLR. Whether you are new to digital SLR photography or an experienced pro, David Busch's Nikon D300 Guide to Digital SLR Photography will help you maximize your camera's capabilities.

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Course Technology PTR; 1 edition (April 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1598635344
• ISBN-13: 978-1598635348
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (97 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #90,914 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #18 in Books > Computers & Technology > Digital Photography & Video > Camera Guides

More About the Author

With nearly 1.5 million books in print, David D. Busch is the world's #1 selling author of camera-specific guidebooks, and the originator of popular series like David Busch's Pro Secrets, David Busch's Compact Field Guides, David Busch's Guides to Digital SLR Photography, and David Busch's Quick Snap Guides.

Most of his hugely successful books for Nikon, Canon, Sony, Pentax, Olympus, and Panasonic digital cameras are the top-selling guidebooks for their respective camera models. His advice has been featured on NPR's "All Tech Considered."

Busch's dozens of other books devoted to digital photography include David Busch's Digital Infrared Pro Secrets and Mastering Digital SLR Photography. As a roving photojournalist for more than 20 years, he has illustrated his books, magazine articles, and newspaper reports with award-winning images. Busch has operated his own commercial studio, suffocated in formal dress while shooting weddings-for-hire, and shot sports for a daily newspaper and upstate New York college. His photographs and articles have been published in magazines as diverse as PhotoGraphic, Popular Photography & Imaging, The Rangefinder, The Professional Photographer, and hundreds of other publications. He's also reviewed digital cameras for CNet Networks and Computer Shopper.

As a writer, photographer, and contributing editor for ten magazines, he has more than 130 books and 2500 articles to his credit. A PR consultant for Eastman Kodak Company's photography divisions for nearly 20 years, Busch has published photography articles under his by-line in Popular Photography & Imaging, PhotoGraphic, The Rangefinder, The Professional Photographer and other photo magazines. His photos have appeared on the covers of magazines, and in both print and television advertising.

The graduate of Kent State University operated his own photo studio and was a principal in CCS/PR, Inc., one of the largest public relations firms based in San Diego, working on press conferences, press kits, media tours, and sponsored photo trade magazine articles. In addition to Kodak, CCS photography clients included Hewlett-Packard. He sold his interest in CCS in 1992 to become a full-time author, photographer, and reporter.

Since then, Busch has become one of the leading photojournalist/authors in the United States. He has had as many as five books appear simultaneously in the Amazon.com Top 25 Digital Photography Books, and when Michael Carr of About.com named the top five digital photography books for beginners, the #1 and #2 choices were his Digital Photography All-in-One Desk Reference for Dummies and Mastering Digital Photography. Several of his digital imaging books have sold in excess of 50,000 copies.

Busch was a featured guest speaking on digital photography on Toronto's Breakfast Television show in 2005, was the keynote speaker at the Dayton Computerfest, and has been a call-in guest for 22 different radio shows nationally and in major markets, including WTOP-AM (Washington), KYW-AM (Philadelphia), USA Network (Daybreak USA), WPHM-AM (Detroit), KMJE-FM (Sacramento), CJAD-AM (Montreal), WBIX-AM (Boston), ABC Radio Network (Jonathan & Mary Show).

His work has been translated into Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Bulgarian, German, Italian, French, and other languages. his web site is http://www.dbusch.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

171 of 180 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Navigating the Menus, April 22, 2008

By 

Conrad J. Obregon (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: David Busch's Nikon D300 Guide to Digital SLR Photography (Paperback)

I've been shooting Nikon cameras since 1960. When I look at the collection of buttons, dials, switches, screens and menus on Nikon's D300 digital SLR, I wonder if I would have become a photographer back then if faced with so many choices.

All these choices are good. They let you customize the D300 to be used exactly the way you would want. And the embarrassment of riches means that one camera can do many things, for many different photographers, so that ultimately a highly sophisticated machine can be delivered more cheaply to photographers whose styles vary markedly.

Some of the choices seem really important. Do you want to set up focus so that you are better able to capture a sitting portrait subject or a flying bird? Other choices seem more trivial. Would you rather review the last image you captured by pressing on the left side or the top of a multi-selector switch?

To deal with all these choices, Nikon provides a manual of several hundred pages that explains the options that are offered with some very small, sketchy illustrations, but without explanation of which options might be better for a particular type of photographer.

David Busch set out to bring a little more clarity to the bewildering field of choices, and does a relatively good job of it. Unfortunately, that means going through each menu and selection step by step. The illustrations are larger than the manual and in color, and Busch actually makes recommendations about items to select. For example the D300 allows you to elect to have either 51 or 11 focus points available (which is different then selecting a focus point, once you've made the choice). My first instinct after reading the manual was to ask why everyone wouldn't select the maximum number of focus points, but the author pointed out that 11 points is faster for selecting a focus point for large subject matter, like photographing some sports.

After going through all of the options, Busch returns to several key subjects that usually require the integration of several choices, like getting the right exposure or the best focusing for particular kinds of photography. There's a chapter on lenses that experienced photographers can skip, but that any beginner bold enough to purchase a D300 for his first digital single lens reflex will find useful. The chapter on lighting contained a good explanation of Nikon's Creative Lighting System that allows for an integration of electronic flash in a more useful way then ever before. I only wish Busch had been able to convey the joy of being able to dance around the subject without any kind of tether while your flashes responded. It's easy to feel like David Hemmings with Veruschka in "Blow Up", without all that hot continuous lighting.

The book finishes up with a quick glance at the software available for post processing, which, other than listing the names of software, really didn't provide much help in making a choice, and then covers some maintenance issues like updating firmware and cleaning the camera's sensor.

By its nature this is not an exciting book, since the author eschews any effort at telling us about the artistry possible with the camera, but that's the nature of manuals. One should also note that occasionally Busch falls from grace in small ways, as when he suggests that the D300 can control up to four groups of lights in CLS, when what he probably means to say is that you can transmit your signals on four separate channels, or that four groups can be controlled if you use an external flash. These errors are small and quickly identifiable to anyone trying to use the menus. On the other hand there are a few subjects on which I would have liked to see more material, like AF Fine Tune, where a discussion of the use of targets to select the tuning would have been useful. And I was sorry the chapter on lenses didn't mention the use of focal length to control perspective, especially since there was a set of full page illustrations that showed this so well.

All in all, this is an excellent introduction to the options that are available to photographers with the D300. Although early adopters may already have figured out most of the possibilities, there is probably still something for an experienced user to learn, and, if you've just picked up a D300, this is lot easier to use then the Nikon manual.

92 of 95 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Advanced camera serves this in-depth coverage, April 22, 2008

By 

Terrence (Solon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: David Busch's Nikon D300 Guide to Digital SLR Photography (Paperback)

I purchased my Nikon D300 in December and at that time bought the Nikon D200 Digital Field Guide because nothing else was available for my camera. I went with the same author, David Busch, for my first D300 book, and I am glad I did! As good as the D200 Digital Field Guide was, the approach taken in this book is much, much better.

Compared to the Digital Field Guides, this book has much more depth and a lot more information on how to use the camera. It's a 450-page full size book with roughly twice the content of a Digital Field Guide, and it features large color illustrations rather than postage stamp sized pictures. To give you the idea of the depth of coverage, this book devotes 117 pages just to menus and setup options, with exhaustive descriptions of how each menu entry works, and why you'd want to select a particular setting. And that doesn't even count a half dozen pages in a later chapter with tables that provide recommended Shooting Menu Bank and Custom Setting Menu Bank settings for particular types of photography.

I particularly enjoyed the 40 pages devoted to lenses, including reviews of all the key lenses available for my Nikon D300. There are another 40 pages on working with light and using the confusing Nikon Creative Lighting System.

Is there anything left out? This time, Busch does not devote a third of the pages to checklist recipes for common shooting situations, as he did with his D200 Digital Field Guide. I think that the owner of a camera this advanced probably doesn't need a couple pages of summaries on how to take photos of seascapes or sunsets. I'd rather have the solid information in this book, which equipped me to go out and take any kind of picture I want to.

52 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book !!!, May 20, 2008

By 

Simon (Beirut (Lebanon)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: David Busch's Nikon D300 Guide to Digital SLR Photography (Paperback)

I received the book of David Busch a few days ago. I hadn't the patience to read the manual that came with the Nikon D300 because of its format and the lack of color in it. I had read on the Internet that this book is very well written. Well, I'm not disappointed at all ! It's a great book (432 pages, 190 full-colour pictures, a lot of tables) that explains every single button and feature of the D300. Beside the detailed explanation, there are also a lot of shooting tips. There are also chapters on getting the right exposure, choosing the right lenses, the lighting basics, useful softwares, cleaning the sensor etc.

I think it's iniquitous to write, as one reviewer did, that this book is a ripp-off because there are a lot of pictures that had been used in the Canon 40D book. The controls and features of the Nikon D300 are very well explained in David Busch's book, with numerous pictures of the buttons of this very camera. If there are some landscape pictures or some paragraphs on the lighting basics that were used in another book, it doesn't not prevent this book from being one of the best tool to learn quite all the capabilities of the Nikon D300 ! I thank David Busch for his great work !!!